In Defense of Philosophy
Philosophy is under attack.
While universities are shutting down their humanities faculties, the profession of philosophy is taking hits all over the place. For example, here on Medium, Rachel Anne Williams (here), Mr Nemo (here), Secular Stoic (here) and Martin Rezny (here) have written forceful critiques of the enterprise.
Evidently, something is going on.
It would be interesting to know what exactly.
Academic philosophy’s wrong turn
I would like to take you on a (very) small tour through the history of philosophy.
When Western philosophy begins, in ancient Greece, it sets out to be therapy for the soul — it sets out to be a practical tool that can help you live well. Philosophers in those days are interested in finding out how families work, how money works, how status works, what we should do about public opinion, death, ambition and all those things that bother each us day.
By contrast, in the 20th the century — I know, big jump — the humanities started to have to compete with the sciences for money and attention in universities. They decided to take the battle by turning themselves into pseudo-sciences. Suddenly the great questions of life became the subject of the kind of study that was akin to studying theoretical…
